Chaplain's Corner

Have you ever been disappointed?  Now that’s a silly question, we all have been disappointed; in fact, disappointment is probably a daily experience for most of us.  Generally speaking we are quite able to tolerate the little disappointments of life.  We feel disappointment when a hope or desire or expectation is not satisfied.

So, when I hope that the weather will be nice for some event I am looking forward to and it isn’t – I feel disappointed.  Or when I desire that the kids remember a special date and they don’t – I feel disappointed.  Or if I expect that others will be considerate of my situation and they aren’t – I feel disappointed.  Life is full of these little disappointments simply because the world doesn’t revolve around my hopes, my desires and my expectations.

But there are times that we struggle with disappointment, when it becomes a big deal, when we can not tolerate it like we usually do.  There are times when disappointment can nearly destroy us or it can shake us so deeply that getting our feet back on the ground is difficult.

Take for instance the wife who expected her husband to be faithful to the vows they exchanged on their wedding day and then she finds out that he has been involved with another woman for the past year.  This is a devastating disappointment.  Or what about the young man who shows promise of being an exceptional athlete who has aspirations of professional sports who has a freak accident that results in his inability to play at the level he had – how does he deal with this life changing disappointment?  Or perhaps the middle aged man who discovers that the company he has worked for the last twenty years has been bought out by a multinational corporation and they are closing the plant and he will be out of work?

These kinds of disappointments can be life changing – they can alter the trajectory of a person’s life and demand adjustments, changes in hopes and desires and expectations that were never even anticipated.  Dealing with the disappointment is the first step that a person needs to take to gain a new perspective on the life they have after the disappointment so that new hopes, new desires and new expectations can be embraced.

However, occasionally, the disappointment is so devastating, so overwhelming, so offensive a person just shuts down.  Or a seemingly small disappointment proves to be the “straw that breaks the camel’s back” and the person’s life simply stops.  The crisis brought on by the disappointment is so profound that the person’s life is totally derailed. Maybe you know someone like that, or maybe that has and is your experience.

How does a person go one after such a devastating disappointment?  It doesn’t help when people say, “Hey, just shake it off and get back into the game.”  Not when the disappointment has made the “game” so distasteful that the person’s response is, “I don’t want to play that game anymore.”  Sometimes the disappointment is so profound that a person just simply loses heart, the person stops caring, stops hoping, stops desiring, stops expecting.  After all, if you expect nothing, hope for nothing, desire nothing you can’t be disappointed.  It does make sense!

Sadly, some disappointment is terminal, for the person who experiences it makes the fateful decision to exit life, choosing death as opposed to ever having to face the pain of disappointment again.  Some of us have come so close to this conclusion and many of us know someone who made such a choice.

But others experience what might be called arresting disappointment, for the disappointment arrests, stops them from every hoping, every desiring, ever expecting again; sometimes in one area of life and other times more comprehensively.  Most people don’t understand what is going on when they encounter this in another’s life.  Judgments like, “lazy” or “unmotivated” are quickly made and little or no efforts is made to explore the reason why a person might not be able to hope or desire or expect any longer.

I have seen this happen spiritually. For instance a person grows up in a spiritual tradition that teaches that if you obey the Lord and carefully follow his commandments nothing harmful will befall you.  So the dedicated soul trusts the Lord and sincerely and honorably seeks to obey the directions of the Lord.  Then an automobile accident kills a teen aged son, or the doctor discovers a cancerous tumor after a routine physical or a parent files for divorce after 35 years of marriage, or a deacon in the church is found to have been molesting a young girl in the Sunday school class he teaches.  How can this be, I have kept my part of the covenant, so why is God allowing these things to happen to me?

God’s allowance of evil is a major cause for disappointment among sincere Christians.  If God is all powerful, if God knows everything before it happens, if God is King of Kinds and Lord of Lords, why does he allow evil things to happen?

Theologically we can attempt to explain this by pointing to the “free will” that God invested humans with when he created our race.  But why doesn’t God step in when he knows a person is planning to do something that will ruin another life?  Why does God seem so indifferent?

When the disappointment is with God it is extremely difficult to manage.  If you have a real interest in exploring this matter of being disappointed with God, pick up a copy of Philip Yancey’s book, Disappointed with God.  He does an honorable job of wrestling with this issue.  But for this article I would like to share how I deal with disappointment, including my disappointment with God.

Stating it sounds so trite and simplistic, but to use the words of an ancient struggler with disappointment, Job, “Thought he (God) slay me, yet will I hope in him.” (Job 13:15a).  I believe the faith God calls us to is so extreme, so comprehensive, that it demands that we trust God, even when it seems that his activity will destroy us.  Like I said, it sounds frightfully simplistic.  But try it.

Next time you are disappointed, ask yourself the question, “Do I trust God so comprehensively that this devastating disappointment can be embraced along side of my faith in His goodness, love and grace?”  You see, faith is not for the faint of heart.  It isn’t the thing of pleasant Sunday mornings.  A study of faith from the Bible soon demonstrates that it is a call to radical, comprehensive trust that suspends all personal evaluations and concludes as Job did, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him.” 

I challenge you to put your disappointment into the verse in the place of the word “slay”:  “Though my son dies…Though, I am found to have terminal cancer…Though I lose my job and have to relocate…Though I have to live with chronic pain for the rest of my life…” put your disappointment in there and then finish the statement – “yet will I put my hope in Him.”  It all comes down to trust and the crisis of disappointment is a crisis of faith.